Working with HBG during the better part of a year, I saw the power that transformative ideas can have on a healthcare business. HBG’s approach to brand is truly immersive. They act as coaches, not just consultants. They serve as strategic partners, not just hired experts. They help to unlock the hidden potential of healthcare brands in ways that few organizations—however sophisticated—cannot accomplish on their own.

My engagement with HBG was literally that: engaging. At every step in the process of helping develop brand identity for a healthcare services company that sincerely needed to forge a path forward, HBG engaged with our executives, our customers, my team, and me in the most intelligent, intuitive, and humanistic ways. Brands don’t have inherent meaning. They are given meaning by the people who stand behind them and in the value they bring to those they serve—much like the healthcare industry itself. HBG’s deep understanding of the healthcare ecosystem and the remarkable team they have assembled to support their clients are among the highest order I have known in my career.

The creative personality of the brand strategy HBG developed was a significant leap forward for us; the language and design elevated our face to the world. I can highly recommend HBG as a strategic partner for any organization looking to evolve its approach to the market, whether it be in articulating your uniqueness, finding your voice or improving any aspect of how you communicate with your clients, customers or partners.

HBG continuously pushed us to think about what makes our company and our products unique. They also worked with us to remove any discomfort we felt by adopting a new position, pushing us out of our traditional mold and old-model approach to how we do business. They were persistent and persuasive in helping our leadership come to the same conclusions they had arrived at during their process. HBG knew that Destiny was an anomaly in the insurance industry, and they helped us embrace and leverage this differentiation rather than seeking a position of comfort by being a ‘me-too’.

In reflecting on the work I was privileged to do with Jeff, Harriet and their entire team, I am struck by the way the relationship evolved into true, mutually beneficial teamwork. In fact, I often found myself introducing HBG leaders and associates as members of ‘our team’ and was apt to type ‘rosalindfranklin.edu’ as their e-mail addresses, because we worked so closely and so well that it was hard to believe they weren’t in the adjacent office. And for a University whose primary differentiator is its focus on teamwork, imagine how refreshing it was to have business partners who didn’t just believe in our philosophy, but actually lived it.

To say that HBG is my company’s marketing and branding firm would be a gross understatement of how much they mean to my company. Before I hired any employee, before any investor wrote a check, and before a physical location was found for my business, I shared my aspirations with HBG. They listened to my dream. From that vision, they created a brand strategy incorporating everything I had wanted and more. With the assistance of HBG’s branding strategy, I then recruited employees, found investors, and solicited business.

It only makes sense that the people developing the strategy should have a role in carrying that strategy through. Working with HBG was one of the best decisions that I have ever made. After researching countless “branding experts” professing to be focused on the Healthcare Industry, I was surprised to see such a wide gamut of segmented services; some were dedicated to developing brand names, some focused on developing just the brand strategy and others were design-focused. The people at HBG do just that: they roll up their sleeves and dive into things from the Due Diligence phase and are with you all the way to execution. Their level of creativity and leadership has been exciting to witness.

HBG is not a marketing agency or an advertising agency. They are our partner, our consultant and my mentor. We know each other well and the relationship we have built allows us to be so much more effective in our branding and messaging because it is OUR branding and messaging. If you choose to work with HBG, you will be working with the best. They are creative, they are artistic, they are energetic and that energy spills over into their relationships.